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Sunday, 14 September 2014

Darklands: Khthones Ophios By Sven

With the newest Kickstarter of Mierce Miniatures launching tomorrow I
thought it would be a great time to start catching up with the blog articles. My Mierce
collection has been growing constantly over the last months and I have been able
to get some games done. Gaming for me always triggers a great motivation to get
painting and so my model choices were mostly aimed at getting playable hosts
ready. One model I’ve owned since the very first kickstarter was Ophios, the
Gorgon of Khthone, basically a special character for the Khthones.

In game terms Ophios has a huge amount of quite powerful attacks, he is a potent
sorcerer and has the ability to summon the powerful Hydra. Also with him being a
unique choice he makes a great general that doesn’t take up one of the few rare
slots, overall a great, yet expensive general.

The first step was to choose a scale colour for such a special unit. I knew
that there will be other (regular) Gorgons released and so I had to find a
pattern that could be varied to represent his status. As all Gorgons have this
wide scaled back and due to the studio paintjob I felt that a cobra theme would
be great on the Gorgons, as you got the space on the back for the typical
“glasses”- pattern. So while the regular Gorgons will get the more common
brownish scales I opted for the metallic king cobra colours for Ophios. The hard part was to get the metallic look to feel natural, I began with a
base layer of gunmetal and inked it with sepia, brown and even a bit yellow and
green until the metallic shine was replaced by the more natural gloss of the
inks. The pattern then was stippled on with an old brush to prevent an
artificial feel. I know, normally king cobras don’t have that pattern on the
main body, but it looked too plain without it and the normal cobras have a
similar pattern.

For completions sake I have included the colour
hierarchy:

Turquoise – Regular troops

Dark Blue – Champions

Rich Blue – Warchiefs

Purple – Warlords

And after giving it some thought I decided to give the unique characters a
separate colour which stands out a bit and so I went for a not-too-bright
red. This colour was achieved by a base layer of heavy red and then washed with
red and purple washes before being highlighted with the same red again. More by coincidence the red armour ties him greatly to the red
basilisks. On the picture above you can also see that I went for a very white
underbelly in the beginning as that’s how king cobras normally look, but later I
changed to a more earthy khaki, that ties him together with the other
snakes.

A highlight for me is the expression of his face, also it’s not very
pleasant (he’s supposed to be quite insane), but I think it looks very full of
character.

I’m very happy with the final result of the scales. While they still look
different from the real king cobra I think they have a realistic yet special
feel to them.

So, that’s the general of my Khthones and one of only two snake men I’ve
painted lately, so stay tuned for more Ysians and Fomoraic.